Dot-Com Is Dot-Gone, and the Dream With It

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: November 25, 2001

MARK LEIBOVICH recalled the day in 1999 when he showed up early for an appointment at a Washington dot-com. Mr. Leibovich, a reporter for The Washington Post , was there to interview the company's executives. "I got there just in time to see the C.E.O. himself wheeling a foosball table into the lobby" to give the impression that the high-tech firm possessed the desired quantum of wackiness that its Silicon Valley counterparts are famous for.

That is so over, and so much more over, even, than before. The popular obsession with the dot-com revolution, fading for more than a year, seems to have simply winked out since mid-September, as firemen and warriors have become the new heroes, and e-commerce's whiz kids are consigned to the cultural boneyard.

Not much more than a year ago, boosters of the New Economy and their true believers in the press were claiming to have changed all the rules. Not just in tech-fetish magazines like Wired, but in self- styled cultural arbiters like New York magazine, which declared the 1990's the "e-Decade." In a 1999 cover story, the essayist Michael Wolff — himself a failed dot-com executive — announced a brave new world. "There is, at the elusive center of the e- experience, the fantasy that we might become free of economic laws," he wrote. "All it takes to make otherworldly riches is the will and desire." It wasn't enough to make money. They had to make history.

Now they themselves are history. Each day, the old idols seem to fade further into the dim past, barely recollected in a country where the languages of "revolution" and "warfare" are no longer just business metaphors. This is the next step after the bursting of the dot-com economic bubble — the bursting of the cultural bubble, the end of the nerd as a crossover hit, of the I.P.O. zillionaire as role model to college students.

The changing of the guard can be seen in little things. Like Henry Blodget, the industry analyst who became famous for predicting early that Amazon.com would reach $400 a share, announcing that he is taking a buyout and leaving Merrill Lynch at the grand old age of 35.

Like the growing wave of books that focus not on the dot-com path to riches but on the wild plunge into the abyss. Having failed to sell their dreams, they are now attempting to sell their failure. A documentary of the rise and fall of a Silicon Alley company was chronicled in "Startup.Com" by Sebastian Nokes, released last winter. Books by former dot-com executives are arriving in stores. Two of the first are "A Very Public Offering: A Rebel's Story of Business Excess, Success, and Reckoning" by Stephan Paternot, founder of Theglobe.com, and "Dot.bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath," by J. David Kuo. Another is coming soon: "Boo Hoo," the chronicle of the spectacular failure of Boo.com, the luxury fashion site that burned through $185 million of its investors' cash and had an online life of just six months, told by its profligate founders.

Did we mention that Mr. Blodget is writing a book?

For the most part, however, the flood of dot-com failure stories is being met with a national yawn. The tell-all books have bounced around the Amazon.com rankings without making inroads into best-seller territory. And why not? Because former idols have feet of clay. In "A Very Public Offering," a book written as amateurishly as the company was run, did we need the image of Mr. Paternot dancing the night away in plastic pants?

Ellen DeGeneres's new sitcom, "The Ellen Show," is built around the notion of an executive returning to her hometown after the collapse of her dot-com, but the show sits at the miserable ranking of 93rd for the season — behind "Emeril," the celebrity chef comedy — despite Ms. DeGeneres's own considerable appeal.

To Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist at George Washington University, the country is experiencing an abrupt cultural shift away from the libertarian, individualistic values that were expressed in the celebration of the New Economy and toward more old- fashioned values in the wake of the terrorist attacks, when government is not The Problem and people are not The Market. "There's been a sea change," he said. The surge in charitable giving and blood donations after Sept. 11, he said, underscores "the sense that you're willing to give priority to the common good, to public safety and public health."

Paulina Borsook, the author of "Cyberselfish," a critical look at dot- com values published last year, said: "People really crave a reminder of human bonds that have to do with sacrifice and fellowship and getting to know each other over time. It's not about changing jobs every six months and getting stock options."

In the 90's, college students hoping to emulate Marc Andreessen of Netscape and other geek stars migrated to Silicon Valley or New York's Silicon Alley with thin résumés and visions of Testarossas dancing in their heads. That's all changing, said Thomas T. Field, director of the Center for the Humanities at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "Many of the young adults that I see coming to campus now say they want fulfilling jobs, not just ways of earning money," he said. "Sounds awfully familiar, when you come from the 60's generation."